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Should we embrace the social media faker?

There’s this guy. He’s become very popular in the “social business” space.

He annoys the crap out of me.

He tweets nothing unique—mainly quotes and platitudes that are very retweetable. He writes nothing original—mainly articles geared to appeal to the masses but without much substance.

He has a PR mission for the company he works for: to become known and, by proxy, to help his company become perceived as a social business. He preaches authenticity and transparency but then has all the employee Twitter accounts set to automatically tweet links to his posts and retweet him.

The PR machine gets him onto the right lists, the right panels, the right interviews, the right blogs. They create progressive stunts to get attention.

Why does this bother me so much?

Am I jealous of that attention? I can honestly say “no” to that. What does bother me is that people buy it. Hook, line, and sinker.

It seems crazy to me that someone who has actually done very little for his company with regard to actual change—or even progressive thought, for that matter—can become a leading voice for the movement of which I’m a part. It makes me feel that the things that actually matter to me, like the hard work of organizational transformation, are being belittled or devalued.

Here’s the thing: I tend to analyze the things that annoy me, and I can’t help but wonder if maybe I’m wrong about this “charlatan” view that I have.
First off, by all accounts he is a nice guy. People I know and trust seem to like him, at least.

Second, there’s no question that this is an “inauthentic” approach, but maybe this is one of those times when if you say something loud enough and long enough you are then forced to become the thing you say you are—or risk exposure? The whole “fake it till you make it” thing?

Is faking it OK?

Is there value in that? Am I being too harsh in my judgment of this guy and others like him? Sure, he seems more concerned about image than reality at the moment, but maybe that will help to create a better reality later on.

I’ll never be in love with this approach, and, yes, it will probably always annoy me when people value what I consider the “wrong” things in this profession. But that’s just life, and I can’t apply my own values to everyone else.

It can’t be my mission to be the white knight out there trying to protect the masses from the snake oil. There are already plenty of those people out there, and frankly I find them just as annoying. Let’s face it, even this post it can be taken as a form of condescension and elitism: “I’m smarter than you, so let me warn you away from your own stupidity.”

The bottom line is that there are things that I wish didn’t work. There are things that make me question my own values and what I’m willing to sacrifice in the name of “success.”

Cognitive dissonance is a bitch, isn’t it? What are your thoughts on the subject?

Matt Ridings is a co-founder and CEO of Sidera Works, a marketing and organizational development consulting practice. A version of this story first appeared on Mark Schafer's blog, {grow}.